Oracle Blog

Technology with a focus on storage, sometimes.

Wednesday Jan 17, 2007

There are a lot of reasons I like to work from home as often as I can. To be honest, the primary one is so that I can spend more time with my little guy and that time is much better when I'm not stressed out from a long car ride through the heart of the commute. On other days, the reason is much more global. I live South of Denver and have a view of the city when I wake up in the morning (not a great view...but a view nonetheless). There are many days where there is a deep brown smog hanging over the city. We have some major temperature inversions here that traps the bad air within the bowl that is Denver.

Still, this brown smog comes from somewhere, and a lot of it is from cars. This evening I finally decided to figure out how much my drive up to the Broomfield Campus (North of Denver) from Highlands Ranch (South of Denver) contributes to the gases that help our little global warming problem. I scanned around the net a bit. There are quite a few calculators that help with this on a yearly basis, this one from the Sierra Club tells me that if I drive my car 12,500 miles on average I will use about 595.2 gallons of gas in my Subaru Outback. I will spend about $1,280 dollars in gas this year. Oh yeah, and I will contribute 16,667 POUNDS of Global Warming Pollution (CO2) into our atmosphere.

I'll say that again, 16,667 POUNDS.

I'm putting about 28 pounds of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere per gallon of gas. Astounding.

Sun Microsystems lets me work from home, quite often in fact. I try to work from home 2 to 3 times a week, sometimes even more. My quality of life goes WAY up and my work is quite efficient these days. I've purchased all of my equipment for work from home since I still have an office, but Sun encourages the work from home program for its employees and takes care of most of the costs if you give up your office.

When I work from home, I try like crazy to keep my car in the garage and not take an extra trip to the office or something to make up for something I may have missed. This way, my work from home impacts the environment less. I can also manage my household heating a little better. My son and I walk to school so I don't take my car out, and I work with what I have and don't make an extra trip to the grocery store. If I go out to lunch I run up to Chipotle on my bike.

Get this, by working from home, I save about 3 gallons of gas (a little over), which in turn keeps about 90 POUNDS of greenhouse gases from going into the atmosphere. In a normal work from home week, I keep about 270 POUNDS of gases out of the atmosphere. I work about 48 weeks, I'm talking about over 6 TONS of greenhouse gases that just don't get put into the atmosphere.

I am going to speak for Denver here, since that is where my emissions will end up.

Thanks Sun for letting me do just a little more to reduce our footprint on the planet.